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HP to Layoff 15,000 Employees
William Robinson writes "ZDNet reports that HP is planning to layoff 15000 employees. IT, sales and services will be among the areas particularly hit, although the sweeping cuts will be felt throughout the company, according to a close source to the company." From the article: "HP is expected to announce the layoffs as early as Monday, but employees are not expected to be immediately notified of their status, the source said, noting such a practice is common in corporate America. More high-level discussions on the layoffs will occur late next week and employees may get a greater sense of their specific status sometime thereafter."
fp
"Starting this year, HP will strive to build every one of our consumer devices to respect digital rights."
I guess the market has spoken, where's Carly now?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Going on previous layoff stories, I give it about 30 seconds before the first "see how evil corporations are?" reply. However, not a one of the detractors has ever addressed the question of where these people would have gotten a similar job without companies like HP. And they condemn the CEOs and shareholders who created all these jobs for taking profits when the times are good, but would never accept the alternative -- advocating sacrifice from the employees when times are bad. And they certainly won't celebrate the 150,000 people who still *do* have jobs created by the likes of HP.
I guess this averages out with management's planned $10 million per executive along with the $1000 normal employee package.
Remember folks, outsourcing is good for the economy!
The economy is doing better. And the economy is doing better because fox news says it is.
Bob: "We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday."
Bob: "Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week."
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
HP is getting rid of anything that might distinguish it from a box-mover like Dell. Just look what it did with the technology assets it got from DEC and Compaq.
In the short term it should improve profitability. I'm not so sure about the long term, though.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
For Once in my time here a nobody gets first post.
;(
And I just bought an iPaq
Seems to be out-source issue here. Go to the HP site and look under Jobs at HP. Do minor search. Seems like they have a lot of position openings at "India - Bangalore" hrmm..
The "indispensible" ones usually have the attribute of time urgency to get things done... and getting another job is now on their list.
The "useless" ones lounge around.
When the managers get around to announcing exactly who is gonna be affected, they get to choose among the useless ones, as the "indispensable" ones by that time already have jobs... working for their competitors.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
...blame our state and federal governments.
Excessive regulations, ridiculous wage requirements, forced benefits, excessive taxation and inflation of the currency all combine to create a country that just can't compete.
Seriously consider moving to a free market like Dubai if you're facing a pink slip. Lots of high paying IT jobs in that freedom-loving city.
Yes, they still employ 150,000 folks. However, the company is fundamentally addicted to H-1b/L-1 visas and has a lackluster recent record at serious technical innovation. For a company like HP to seriously thrive, they _must_ innovate. At this point, HP is more the preserve of bean counters than inventors.
Thy are no planning, its already been started month ago, my team got laid off couple weeks ago. and before us, atleast 15-20 people got laid off out of around 200 people at Dearborn, MI location. and thy are planning to reduce atleast 30% of work force, and off shoring to Toronto, Malasiya and India, and replacing with cheap contract.
Fucking disgusting what has happened to HP over the last 5 years. Compaq merger was a disaster. Carly was a disaster. Hewlett and Packard would be astonished at what their company is doing today. I feel really sorry for all the HP workforce that've had to endure this b/s.
I just found out I am getting laid off.
On slashdot.
That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. So now you have 15,000 less people to lead/manage but you still have the same number of executives and managers. That seems to create a very top heavy structure and those tend to fall over both in the management world and the engineering world.
The more cynical side of me tells me that the execs and managers have more pull so would put up more of a fight if laid off. I'm sure the top level execs know the middle level ones at personal level so found it harder to laid them off. Instead, the little peons on the bottom who they barely know or care about can fend for themselves.
HP Services has roughly 65,000 employees, but analysts are predicting HP will lop off only about 8 percent here because the company is working on edging out IBM Global Services, EDS and Accenture for corporate contracts. "We estimate that HP has roughly 20,000 salespeople, with the majority in (enterprise server group) and Services, and that CEO Hurd is likely to look to streamline the organization, moving away from HP's current 'matrixed' selling organization to focus on more direct accountability," Sacconaghi said.
I really hate the word "accountability" when used in isolation. From my experience, if accountability is the only method being used to solve problems, people start playing politics and the blame game. Bueraucracy goes through the roof and everything has to be documented in case the problem doesn't get solved. You end up spending more time covering your ass than solving the problem. You also end up taking a toll on teamwork.
It seems to me that their current strategy is to lower costs so they can lower their margins to compete. Not a bad plan but there are other avenues. I know at my company, we're more than willing to pay more for better service and reliability. The initial contract cost isn't the only factor. We have to think about the cost of downtime.
Noncritical research and development (R&D) could also be impacted, analysts suggest. HP's R&D spending is nearly $1 billion higher than all of its relevant competitors combined, according to an independent benchmarking analysis done by Sacconaghi's firm. The comparison was designed to mirror the one that Hurd has professed as his method for bringing costs back into line. "We suspect that Hurd might be able to lower HP's annual $3.5 billion in R&D by $250 (million)-$500 million through the elimination of non-core projects, Sacconaghi said. So they're going to gut the thing that made HP great in the first place. I don't know what they consider non-critical R&D but a lot of innovations aren't obviously useful at first. Didn't a division of HP invent the optical mouse? I wonder if that was considered critical at the time.
Again, I'm not a CEO. I'm all for making an organization more efficient but I wonder if they're making the right cuts. It's sad to see the "Grey Lady of the Silicon Valley", the engineers' corporation get hacked to pieces.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
It does seem to be as the parent post suggests.
Just making a search using the term 'Service' at HP India produces 192 new positions.
Job Search HP India
(Scroll down if you don't have a vertical monitor / insane resolution)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Apply here if you wanna work for HP.
m tahx
http://jobsearch.monster.com/jobsearch.asp?co=xke
There are lots of good scientific devices companies. Hopefully in the long term we will have more companies like what HP was in 1970,80 or 90 emerge and do what the old HP used to do.
This all started with Bush Sr, and his NAFTA, to export jobs to Mexico. I remember the lies, how it would stregnthen the American workforce.
Now the current Bush is exporting jobs to India.
Anyone see a pattern of what the republicans are doing? They got the idea, they no longer need American workers. So they started transfering jobs outside of the USA.
How many more decades do we have before the USA is on par with Mexico in terms of wealth. We will have the likes of Ted Turner owning 2 million acres of land. We will become a nation where 4% of the population lives in gated and gaurded communities, and everyone else will live in an apartment, in places filled with violence, and we will be called sub-human.
Remember, it was not that long ago when families only needed one person to work, to pay the bills, to feed the family. The past 10 years, most families have both parents working. And in the next 10 years, we will see both parents working multiple jobs. But it is okay, I am sure Sony will have the next generation playstation by then.
How can any country justify having CEO's that make $10,000,000+ a year, and having janitors who make $5.75 an hour? It is like what happened with the World Trade Center, when the government was cutting checks to families of survivors. The valuable lives got checks in the millions of dollars, the janitors families got 1/10th of that. It is like Baseball, I remember being a kid when it was a big deal for a player to sign a 1 million dollar deal. Tickets were cheap. Hot dogs were cheap. Heck, the ballpark was a cheap evening, and you would get fed. Now players demand $100 million contracts, and there is advertising in every corner of the ballpark and hot dogs cost $4.50, parking is $15, tickets are over $40. Normal blue collar families no longer go to the ballpark, but that does not matter because teams found they can make more money selling the best seats to corporations. I guess it is a nice benifit for salespeople and executives, to go somewhere they believe is popular, even though they know little about the game or players.
I hope my kids don't have the future I think they will. A small studio, with advertising inside the apartment that can't be turned off. Working 6 days a week, 10 hours a day, and still not having enough to eat good food. And having a police that exists not to protect people, but to keep the poor out of the rich neighborhoods.
Money is evil. It makes people do horrible things.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Hewlett-Packard (HP) was once known for how much they cared about their employees.
It just goes the show that short-term, bottom-line only thinking really isn't good business sense.
If you think of the modern corporation as a machine for making money then it makes sense to re-engineer its cogs periodically.
Unfortunately the cogs in this case are people. Where I work they laid around 100 people off 3 years ago and there is still a lingering feeling of resentment. However, the company is now profitable , so at least some people got to keep their jobs - better than everybody hitting the unemployment line, right?
Fortunately for us and unfortunately for uncreative management, layoffs are not a panacea - they've got to keep a few of us monkeys around (at least in the forseeable future), right?!
to layoff
There is no such verb, you illiterate clod! Tell us where you work so we can arrange for you to receive a note from your boss demonstrating the correct use.
I don't know what happened to HP the past 15 years. When I was a kid, there was only one King of laser printers, and that was HP. Nobody made better laser printers in the world.
3 or 4 years ago, a friend purchased a HP computer, it had windows ME on it. She was in college, and she called me a few times while she was writing papers and got the blue screen of death. There was nothing that could be done to save the paper. Hours of work went down the drain. I know... I told her "save your work more often". But that computer was a horrific peice of crap. I did a clean install with the CD's thinking that might help things, but it took me a while to realize that Windows ME did not work well with that HP computer.
It is too bad HP merged with Compaq, at least Compaq made good computers.
It seems like there is a pattern. Merge two large companies into a super large company, then fire people and give managers bonuses.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
HP the corporate entity appears as far as I can tell to have just brought together some bright engineers and some manufacturing plants, and put the result within the reach of consumers willing to exchange currency for it.
Is it possible, at all, that somehow this transaction (the engineers designing the computers and printers and such, the plants that manufactured computers and printers and such off those designs, the consumers who decided the thus manufactured products were worth expending their money on) could have somehow come to pass and functioned in some way other than the specific system of a government-created incorporated entity (in this case named "Hewlett Packard") which acts as a legal personage and exclusively accepts all responsibility and blame for actions taken by employees and investors; is owned by a collection of "shareholders" chosen because they hold pieces of paper obtained through cryptic dealings in New York; and is run by a board chosen by those shareholders?
Because if this specific system (the government-licensed "corporation", the stockholders, etc) is in fact the only way that all those people creating and buying hewlett packard computers could have come to pass, then we can call the board of HP "responsible" for all the good things that have resulted from HP's existence. But I'm pretty sure there's more than one way this could have all happened. Which starts to make it seem kind of reasonable to start looking for other ways to think of the HP board. Like, "parasitic middleman".
There's this old (and usually just implied) idea that because something good happened in a capitalist or corporatist system, capitalism or corporatism itself gets to take credit for it. Regardless of the claims of libertarian theologists, I have trouble taking this seriously; capitalism doesn't create wealth, it only distributes it. Nevertheless, capitalism does do a pretty good job (compared to some other systems, at least) of not actually standing in the way of the people who are creating wealth. So that's good, I guess. But what just seems batshit loony to me is when some group of people tries to stand up and take credit for all the good things capitalism makes possible-- saying that hey, all those things we assume capitalism gets to take credit for? well actually I get to take credit for it-- and claim this credit because, um, well seemingly just because they're rich.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
It's inept management to shitcan 15k people, since it's inept management to "suddenly" find yourself with 15k redundant people who need to be shitcanned all at once.
But my guess is that someone's just assuming that they can can 10% of the workforce and nobody'll notice the difference and they'll net about a billion after expenses in extra profit.
Sounds like the echoes of two garbage trucks colliding...
It's been my experience that people who do the non-specialized business work tend to think that their "leadership" is invaluable to the company, when in reality it is easily reproduced. An engineer can rise to the occassion and be a good leader, but a person whose formal training is just "business" or a MBA and a liberal arts background cannot just rise to the occassion and be a replacement engineer. Leadership is something that is half nature, half nurture. Most people I've ever known, myself included, who are good at leading have a very strong natural knack for leading and organizing.
Personally, I would want efficiency-minded former engineers to head an engineering company I was the CEO of. I'd want these former engineers because they'd know what's bullshit and what's not and that'd keep my company's ass farther away from the fire. We're sentient beings, not hive workers. To paraphrase Heinlein, specialization is for insects, there is no reason why someone who spent most of their career as an engineer cannot have a good sense for business and be a good business leader.
Since the buck clearly doesn't stop at the CEO's desk in most situations, I don't see why stockholders waste tens of millions of dollars of their company's money on them. At a company like HP, the CEO is naturally going to be detatched from most of the company's operations and excuse me, but I just don't see why any company would sacrifice anyone who could contribute to R&D of new products when cuts in middle and upper management employment and salaries would yield decent results.
Which is more likely to bring a higher ROI: firing many of the people capable of making new products and keeping many of the middle managers and their upper management ilk, or trimming top down? Maybe if HP put many of those people on some good projects, they'd do a lot of good for the company. It'd be ironic if several groups from the 15,000 who get laid off end up founding companies that make the next iPod, Tivo or something like that.
I'm not saying that many of them shouldn't have been laid off, just that it is incredibly stupid to fire people who can make products if assigned properly, but not cut back severely on upper management's pay and the ranks of the middle managers. When Sun laid off a number of its Solaris and Java developers, but didn't fire McNealey, that loud mouth imbecile, I just shook my head. In order to save money and face, our shiny suit wearing business elite would rather fire people with very hard to find engineering skills that could make or break the success of their products than cull the ranks of their own.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
HP is firing 15,000 employees on top of the 3,000 jobs they already have cut since November.
IBM announced cutting 10,000 to 13,000 jobs in Europe just last month.
Ford and General Motors can't sell cars and are at risk of defaulting on their debt -- their credit rating has been cut down the minimum by ratings agencies.
So is this the freight train of a bull economy everyone is raving about? I'm an amateur financial enthusiast but I strongly suggest anyone thinks twice before buying any mutual funds in this climate. Stocks are at 4 year highs and future prospects don't look positive at all
I left HP's services organization in May, and I have to say that it was a wonderful move.
I worked for them for 4 years, and there seemed to be no interest in employee development. I was making a good salary, but found no interest in spending a few thousand a year to develop skills and interests among the talented employees. The reason I stayed as long as I did was the fact that I was on an account contracted for a long enough period of time, that my job appeared safe, but with HP, I felt like I was "playing not to lose".
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I don't want to get in the way of your tear, but I think NAFTA was very much a bipartisan effort.
The idea had been talked about long before Bush I was in office, he had some discussions about it. President Clinton signed the NAFTA deal on Dec 8, 1993. And I believe it was ratified by a Senate and House, both with Democratic majorities. (57-43 Dems in the Senate, and 258-176 Dems in the House) You can check which party was in government in recent history at this link.
Cheers.
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
A business merger that failed to live up to the hype and left the company for the worst!? Why I've never heard of such a thing.
http://www.answers.com/layoff&r=67
The verb lay off has 2 meanings:
Meaning #1: put an end to a state or an activity
Synonyms: discontinue, stop, cease, give up, quit
Meaning #2: dismiss, usually for economic reasons
Synonym: furlough
Corporations have no god-given right to their property-rights. They were given the environment that provided their property rights by the US's citizens who defended not only defended those property rights with their lives and tax dollars, but were the source technologically creative culture these globalizing traitors now sell-out to foreign competitors with the cooperation of corrupt politicians.
PS: This isn't to say this movement of labor off-shore isn't welcomed. The less power companies like HP have over the US the faster the US will recover from the slide to third-world status created by these Frankenstein monstrosities.
Seastead this.
It really ought to be a matter of common sense that employees won't know their status immediately. Someone decides at a high level that they're going to change their priorities, and each division needs to cut their spending by a certain percentage. That percolates down, with managers at each level deciding which portions of their organization are most valuable and efficient. Sometimes whole divisions will be cut or merged (with cuts delegated down) and often the cuts will go down to the individual employee level. As much as it sucks to be uncertain about this, employees now have some warning and time to prepare their resumes and ask their contacts in the industry about positions while management carefully weighs how to do this in a manner that will best serve the company, so that they won't have to do anything else of the sort in the foreseeable future.
If you think about it, having the CEO and VPs make check marks on a list of people they've never even met and announce that without warning would be far, far more evil.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
The headline in India today was "HP hires 15,000 new employees"... so which is it?
Being one of the resident curmudgeonly grammar freaks, I feel inclined to point out that "layoff" is a noun, and "lay off" is a verb (phrase). Therefore, it isn't possible to "layoff" someone; instead, you must lay them off.
As for the layoffs... well... I really believe in free, borderless markets. I really really do. But I think we can take a lesson from the EU, and require an adherence to a minimum set of criteria before granting full trade privileges. Giving other markets power without responsibility is a bad thing; without some sort of market synchronization we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.
What if we could say "Okay, India, we'll have completely free trade with you if you become a member of WEFTA (World-Encompassing Free Trade Agreement) and have your economy up to minimum standards within five years."
Maybe a four-tiered system could be made:
This is a bit more complicated than the current EU system, but the idea is the same: Don't let our jobs, our money, our very economy go to those who aren't gonna play by the rules. Small economic variations in WEFTA would exist and would be allowed (it's cheaper to live in a small town in Ithaca, NY than it is in Beverly Hills, CA) for free-trade regions but this $1-an-hour-factory-in-Mexico phenomenon wouldn't exist to pull jobs from the lower rungs of the U.S. (or any full WEFTA member) economy.
If only we could get our Congress to get their charbon and acier together.
Previously it was the US and GB providing technology to the world. Now it's the opposite - the world provides technology for HP - and people expect that the same amount of people are needed to be employed for the latter as the former? Good grief.
I was irked when HP spun off its test equipment business as Agilent. HP had a long, proud history as a test equipment maker. It seemed like the tail wagging the dog.
If HP is in trouble now, then I am glad that Agilent is well away from it. Maybe if HP goes bust, Agilent can buy back the name.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Board of directors: "That's the first time and the last time we ever let a woman run our company."
This instance does not speak for all women, but this definitely will not help them either. Thanks, Carly.
They keep disconnecting me every 5 minutes. The good news is, they're giving me a new IP address each time, so I can post whatever the fuck I want to Slashdot. No bans for me!
Sorry, I think your vision of Chile is a bit flawed. Discussion is getting a bit off-topic now (but still has something to do with the main post anyways... hell, it's the first time I have actually heard a north-american talk about wage differences and things like that. It impressed me :) ).
:p
:) ?
I'm trying to attack the 'uncivilized culture' most american/outsiders seem to have of latinamerica, more specifically this country.
The north american vision of latinamerican countries , for the most part it seems, is as was described on the upper post, but it isn't all like that, in reality.
I do have to speak locally (and Chile's one of the best places right now in south america to live: Bolivia's boiling with civil unrest, Argentina's still recuperating, etc. ), but situation isn't that bad. I don't know what place you are living right now, but the post-apocalyptic place the guy described isn't the norm (hell, I haven't heard of any place like that). Even if the comment was hyperbolic, I still think it doesn't connect with reality.
While I don't know all cities here, for the most part life is as 'normal' as your every-day american one. Sure, we might have less hi-tech stuff, our cultures may be different, but people don't suffer from "not having enough to eat good food". Makes us sound barbaric
Of course there are problems, and they are big. Social injustices, like wage differences, are very real. But isn't that a problem everywhere
BTW, where are you living?
-Zer0s
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Mayor incompetence from HP top management will be paid with lay offs, there you have it, how a mayor in history and I don't know what other crap lead HP to a disaster. Thanks god Bill and Dave are dead and can't see such a slump.
RIP HP
Are you a great HP employee? Do you have a history of exceptional service creating great products? Tired of the new HP way, where you don't get to do anything interesting, and where you'll see all of your friends and colleaugues get walked out the door in tears?
Well you can do something about it! You can both fuck HP and get a great new job with good pay and benefits! You can meet new friends, excel at your job, and do something new!
How? Just apply for one of the jobs I have posted right now! That's right, I'm looking for great talent. My organization is stable, and rarely has mass layoffs like your crap company. We work on innovative products that capture the minds of people.
Be a mover. A shaker. Do something innovative for a change!
Thos complex policy *CAN* be resumed in a few word on a board. Example (anonymously posted) from a german firm "Management :let us otusource to India ! We'll spare money! Lots ! Buckload ! Look at that pretty powerpoint with shiny nubmer proving it!!
ME(and other engineer): But you are clearly underestimating the maintenance cost, and the know how of the persons...
Management:Everything will be good ! Let us fire some senior engineer and hire an India company !
(cue to 6 month later , maintenance is crapped over, they rehired the previous fired personal, and now we pay for the old personal *AND* the indian outsourcing firm).
Complex policy. Yeah. Rght.
Many smart technical people are now free to form their own companies and compete against a weakened HP and other companies like it!
I'd like to inject a little bit of concrete food for though into the argument. I just took a look over at HP's Job Application Page. It would seem the Indian facilities are constantly in a hiring phase (it's been like this for months, if you check regularly).
The article seems to indicate the layoffs will hit multiple areas, including sales. This, when coworkers I know in sales are already understaffed. The worst part? These sales people got to listen to Hurd when he came to their site talk about how it doesn't make sense to let sales people go who are doing their job, since they make the company money. He did speak about needing to reorganize a bit to be more efficient, but layoffs were never brought up as part of that plan.
IT, yeah, if I was working in internal IT, I'd be fearful of my job. Hurd talked about our IT costs per employee being over double what IBM and Dell spend, and yet the company is full of non working systems and bad programs. Job cuts here make sense, and better managment to streamline the combine respirces of Digital, Tandem, Compaq and HP.
Support? Well, support people live in a constant fear state anyhow. This announcement is nothing big, though if it hits a few groups by even a person or two, customers WILL notice the difference. Already these groups go through staffing issues when team mates take vacation. Lay off a few, and on a vacation day, customers may end up waiting for a phone tech for hours. Not good when the HP premium on servers and storage has usually been justified by higher quality support. Get rid of that, and customers will have no problem buying the slightly worse, but cheeper products from Dell or elsewhere.
Long term vision left HP ages ago. Quarter to quarter numbers are all that matter now, and not how will HP be doing in 5-10 years.
Anyone know if Apple is hiring? Every time I see Jobs speak on a financial news segment, he gets asked "Why do you think the stock dropped today after your announcements" (referring to January Macworld.) "I don't really pay attention to the day to day price. If you look at our stock over the past few years, it has done well, and I think it will continue to do so."
Or, if anyone knows any other tech comapny who is actually concerned with long term success, let me know.
How many people of the lowest here - the sales and support employees could be saved by dumping say the top 3 wage earners at HP.
Having had to call the support line at HP for a faulty bit of hardware recently I have to say they need more phone agents.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
Don't forget that things have been changing over the last twenty years; and it is now common for high level executives to have ph.d.s in quantitative disciplines.
At the first year in Harvard business school, students take the same curriculum as the graduate students in economics. That means they cover matehematical optimization (linear, non-linear, and some dynamic) and econometric modeling in addition to more theoretical microeconomic theory.
I think the idea of the incompetent executive is somewhat of a myth. Most of these people are very educated and capable.
I wonder if the place where HP Unix and OpenVMS is based will be hit hard.
All that HP offers for home computers is Windows.
HP is still supporting Microsoft's monopoly for home computers.
You've found the problem with layoffs: the decision isn't made by an impartial observer, it's made by the managers, the people LEAST likely to go after their own. You can't even trust a consultant to get it right, since the guy you hire is going to be an ex-manager, whose only direct contact with your company is through the managers.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Ha! Ha!
the price of ink cartridges will skyrocket...
just a hunch
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
I don't work for, near, or against NCR in any market, I just live here. My perception has been that Hurd took NCR and focused them on ATM machines, their core business. Lots and lots of other unrelated things were shed, including long-term employees and facilities. Most recently, NCR has turned over maintenance of their world-class headquarters to a local office-real estate company (Miller Valentine). Their ATM sales, by the way, are in competition with the infamous Diebold, Inc. And in that market, Diebold is innovating with ways to keep banks coming back to them. NCR just never seemed to get the hang of it.
Now back to HP and the recent high speed printing invention , and I would have to say we can all expect HP to shed all the unprofitable businesses and focus heavy on the printing. Well, heavier than they already do.
I expect that if HP is in some select-contract, highly-profitable, niche market that they will stay there. NCR has their TeraData database. HP had, during the merger claimed that Compaq's worldwide sales and services forces would allow them to dominate global industries, but I don't think that really every took foot they way they wanted to. So, unless they drum up something other than calculators and home PCs, those segments are likely to get hit hard. Hurd likely won't wait for the home PC market to do something unique because they've had a couple of dozen years to find a niche and haven't. I'd better say goodbye to the calculator segment too before Cringely goes around saying something stupid like "you saw it here first."
So that leaves the saturated inkjet market. Since the DMCA cannot be used, and since we're already paying $3,800US per gallon of ink, increasing profitability will be difficult to do without large customer outbursts. Of course, NCR was so full of waste, those of us in Dayton didn't think they could ever shed all of it and yet they did.
What I personally dislike most about this is the way this number is determined. In stead of a carefull evaluation of the employed personnel and required personnel, companies look at their cash balance and determine the amount of people they need to fire.
Although I can understand sometimes this is the only way to save a company, I suspect that in 9 out of 10 cases this is a message to the shareholders at the expence of employees. Which, in the end, probably hurts the company more than it helps, because simply fireing people alone isn't going to do much good.
On the other hand I also think many of these messages of mass-layoffs are never completely realised. Maybe it's mostly a way for the upper management to send a message to the shareholders: "look we're really taking care of the problems", while in reality only part of the proclaimed number of people is fired in a big reorganisation.
I'm only speculating here though, can someone enlighten me?
I do pity the middle managment that need to actually fire so many people though. It sure can't be much fun for them. Even worse, with a bit of bad luck they are fired as well when their work is done.
As for the layoffs... well... I really believe in free, borderless markets. I really really do. But I think we can take a lesson from the EU, and require an adherence to a minimum set of criteria before granting full trade privileges. Giving other markets power without responsibility is a bad thing; without some sort of market synchronization we're just shooting ourselves in the foot.
What if we could say "Okay, India, we'll have completely free trade with you if you become a fully-compliant member of WEFTA (World-Encompassing Free Trade Agreement) and have your economy up to minimum standards within five years."?
Maybe a four-tiered system could be made:
This is a bit more complicated than the current EU system, but the idea is the same: Don't let our jobs, our money, our very economy go to those who aren't gonna play by the rules. Small economic variations in WEFTA would exist and would be allowed (it's cheaper to live in Ithaca, NY than it is in Beverly Hills, CA) for free-trade regions but this $1-an-hour-factory-in-Mexico phenomenon wouldn't exist to pull jobs from the lower rungs of the U.S. (or any full WEFTA member) economy.
If only we could get our Congress to get their charbon and acier together.
I strongly suggest anyone thinks twice before buying any mutual funds in this climate
My oil stocks are going through the roof!
It's the Favorable Exchange Rate and difference in Purchasing Power Parity which makes outsourcing so profitable to companies. Please read up on these topics before posting ignorant posts. I would point you to the relevant Wikipedia article, but I'd rather have you work a little towards overcoming your ignorance.
I'm not sure how it works in every company, but in the huge tech corporation that employs me, your manager has nothing to do with your laying off other than telling you about it. Human Resources decideds who is going to be laid off, tells the manager what names are on the list and he relays it to his employees on the morning that the layoffs occur.
First of all, I want to say that you are right about many things, especially hiring former engineers to managers in engineering company.
...But then again, why should I care that other people ruin many companies. Just more opportunies for those who do know what they are doing ;-)
The thing that needs to be discussed here is, if HP is or is not an engineering company. They do work with technology, but I would argue that their fields of technology are mature and don't involve as much engineering and innovation than they did before. That's why I categorize them more as marketing and assembly company. If you look at their products: Workstations, Laptops, Servers, Printers, Scanners & Cameras, one can argue that they are all commodized. The technology needed is allmost the same from manufacturer to manufacturer. Only way to add value to these offerings is to use branding and design to create added value in customers mind, the other way is to offer services.
I think that the problem with HP is that they were first engineering company and were on the edge of the technology cycle. As the times went by, they loosed technology battles and had to retreat from many fields. They had create success with imaging products, but what they did forget todo was to invent new things. As the result of innovating hard, and inventing lazy, they became marketing and assembly company. In away one can say that HP and Compaq merger was the last knot that transformed HP from engineering to marketing. The problem with HP now is that thought they have transformed, they have still lot's engineering. Bigger problem is that all places in the market have been taken by others. Dell is the king of assembly companies and they really can't beat them. Same goes with IBM in the entreprise arena. Most of the real engineering is done by other companies ie. Intel, Microsoft, Sun, Novell, Redhat, Oracle etc.. So the big question is what is HP going to do? I hope that their answer isn't just to trim down, that wouldn't in the long run give them reason to be alive.
It's a good question how HP could have avoided all this and what went wrong. A good place to put blame is Carly and other MBA's, but that is insufficient. In my view HP just got too big, they lost their concentration times ago. They should have spinned imaging and customer sides of HP away, or transfered the enterprise and engineering sides to a new company. It's very hard to be a company with many faces, and there isn't so many companies in the end product field that have done this with success.
Maybe all this and other fallen angels of technology industry could have been avoided by better education. As a soon to be graduating economics student (from computer science, don't ask) I have to say that the blame lies in business education. Many people start business studies with idea of doing something cool with customer products (think of likes L'oreal, Coca-cola, Tivo etc..) and they end up in some industrial company with no idea what is going on. The worst thing is that many people that do work industrial area treat these industries as the same as your regular consumer industries. When you have people saying "it's just technology" or "I don't have to know the details" or "just say which one is better" then you know there is much wrong in the picture.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
for HP.
What is needed now in PCs/servers AFAIC is someone to drive down the costs of thin-clients, clustering, and modular computing. Given HP's history, this will likely be missed by a full light-year as they retrench in more of the same that got them where they are now.
What exactly is the cost of HP-UX compared to Linux and what are the comparitive support prices compared to say, Red Hat or SuSE? Or BSD for that matter if you want to put it closer to the System V side? What exactly do they have to offer there?
What are they going to give me that I can't get cheaper by leaps and bounds from Dell or for that matter Systemax?
What are they going to offer me for my ongoing needs and is their (*gag*) "vision" going to fit with what I'm doing? Or are they going to follow Redmond's lead not to mention the various hardware standards groups rather than innovating?
I don't see HP (*cough*) "getting it".
My wish list is simple, btw. Given I can get fully packed desktops for under $500, I want a blade server where the backplane and hot swap power supplies with one master board costs no more than a standard whitebox server and each blade is under $500 given that it is stripped of unneeded sound, graphics, and other tchotchkes as well as case and power supply. Why should I be paying over $1000 for a blade when I can get a whitebox with a comparable processor for under $750 and that comes with all sorts of things left out of the blade?
One of the few areas you pay a premium for them to leave something out that you don't need. You're bribing them not to put it in.
I want a *nix to do load-balancing, failover and load-sharing clustering with remote network boot thin client serving much like I could get for free with a few spare days of recompiling various distributions and project sources. I'm willing to pay but if it is going to cost an arm and a leg and get me less support than asking a couple questions on various web forums does, no dice.
Given what I am looking for and knowing what I do of HP, I am not holding my breath. This is just one of many many areas HP could have tried to get into where no one else is bothering. Instead we got the Compaq merger, we got Carly Fiorina and the saga of her removal, anything but a forward looking company doing anything to compete. We got craptastic personal PCs that Dell or even the average local whitebox maker could beat. We got Vectras that weren't offering anything that other business box builders couldn't offer and for less. We got a company living on their printer division's glory days while a host of competitors ate away at them, nibbling like carpenter ants.
We got the HP name and that was it, but we also got the decline in value of the HP name at the same time. So... what was the point? I'm sure that's on the minds of those being laid off as they recount their time at HP. What was the point?
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
HP bought both Compaq who had bought DEC. I am under theimpression the Compaq piece is the most underperforming due to the relentless efficiencies of DELL
Now that they are going to be unemployed soon, maybe they can put in practice what they preach.They should GET UP OFF THEIR LAZY AZZES AND FIND A REAL MAN'S JOB.There are plenty of jobs digging ditches here in the u.s.a., there's also McDonalds. Jobs are plentiful here in the good ol' u.s.a. , so this is NOT news. HAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!
Why do people think that the 15,000 employees laid off will be the most "useless" ones? Large corporations are not concerned with the type of employees they let go, they care about the bottom line. You could lay of 15,000 good employees and still increase profit in the short-term.
I think the idea of the incompetent executive is somewhat of a myth.
Look at companies that made their fortune on innovative engineering, and were then led by bean counters, such as SGI and HP.
Hate to make a me-too post, but I think your analysis of HP is spot-on. They've become a commodity marketing company that is unfortunatly still thinking and staffed like a top-tier engineering and sales company (in other words, like IBM). Sadly, it wouldn't suprise me to see HP come out of this less with less than 25% of the employees they had a few years ago.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Let's looks on the bright side, maybe they just laying off people who were hired under the previous CEO.
If you rent,you get no deduction. If you own, you get a deduction. right there anyone should see how bogus that is, it creates an economic inertia. If you as a slum lord real estate tycoon own x-number of homes, you get x-number of deductions. You can buy more and more property then. Your renters get bupkis,so it tends to keep them renters that way. If you (joe corporation) outsource a job, you get a *tax break* from uncle sam. No lie, on the books. They also allow imports from nations which have much higher import duties on our exports, there is no balance, there is no "free trade".
Bad news is, that's reality. The good news is, the real estate bubble will pop some time soon and all those leet slum lords and rich wannabes who want a lot of something for nothing with their "investments"will have nothing but debt to the REAL leet dudes who set up this congame, and they are the ones who pushed for the stricter bankruptcy laws with their elite pro gouging and pro greed politicians they made sure to get in. They will be seriously SOL with no skills other than being leet, which won't be too leet no more.
I'll be laffin like crazy when that happens, too.
Anyone who knows how he slaughtered the workforce at NCR should have expected this....
Tech companies biz model seems 2b 30% H-1's, 40% outsource, and the rest of us schmucks.
"Hewlett and Packard would be astonished at what their company is doing today."
The company Hewlett and Packard founded is now called Agilent. What HP does now has nothing to do with what they did originally.
Vote for Pedro
It's astounding that with u.s.'s economy based mostly on selling, they're getting rid of mostly sales jobs. It's everywhere in the news: u.s. doesn't belong in implementation and design because the culture emphasizes selling. Getting rid of selling jobs is like making someone who doesn't like coleslaw eat coleslaw. Furthermore, sales jobs are the ones that lead to the executive jobs but they're keeping the executive jobs.
If you don't understand what you're doing, then you can't successfully manage it.
This isn't always true, but it's true such a large percentage of the time that only a fool would bet against it.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I found it interesting that the article noted, "additional cuts may lower morale.." uh...morale was already in the pit. It can't get much lower, even in the divisions that are money makers.
Part of the reason I ended my eleven-year career in May was layoffs. I simply hated waiting for the other shoe to drop. People would just disappear, and you'd find out later that they'd been laid off. (WFR'd in HP speak.) Being told by my manager that, "We're pretty safe (from lay offs) but NO GUARANTEES..." about drove me NUTS. Also, when the CEO comes to town and makes a specific point that HP has more IT people than sales people, it's time for an IT guy to take serious stock of the situation.
In the long term I think Hurd will be good for the company, and I wish my former compatriots the best of success. A lot of fat needs to be trimmed, but the question is, "Can he tell the difference between fat, muscle, and bone?" There's a whole lot of fat in middle management right now.
"That's no moon"... Obi-Wan Kenobi
In India, Malaysia, and other countries with unenforcable intellectual property law, does the employee's work still belong to the company?
For example, an Indian worker creats the embedded C++ code for an HP printer, is that embedded C++ code property of HP or can the employee give it away?
In other news, the word 'They' has announced today a 25% letter reduction, the vowel department will be among the areas particularly hit.
Fuck drug dealing. Fuck burgulary. Fuck vandalism. Fuck crime. FUCK THE HIP HOP REVOLUTION.
Ever wonder why more crimes, per capita within race, are committed by blacks against blacks? It has nothing to do with wealth but everything to do with culture. It's simply not black to behave like a civil human being. I truly am sorry for the Uncle Toms who try to take straight path who are discriminated against because their black skin makes them look like the bottom feeding scum that inhabits slums.
The real reason for the Iraqi war is to send hip hop rats to Iraq disguised as our "honorable" troops and trim the ghettos.
I guess I may be burning karma and grousing, but I'm willing to forfeit ALL my remaining karma, and any Meta Mod points to say the following:
/. gave me the benefit of the doubt and tried to pull teeth at HP and failed, or gave up with one, "We don't discuss layoff policy before the PR department has seen a designated newspaper publish it, and even after then, we refer inquiries to the published paper or our website after we've made it official on our website..."
I reported this FRIDAY, 15 July at 1207 (and I am sure the paper was printed before 6AM Friday, which means ), and even put it in my journal, and even bought the Friday paper to have a hard copy. I think it would have made better excitement than to wait for SUNDAY just to see ZDNet's blurb. I guess ZDN *could* have had a writeup on it first, but I
"googled" keywords and Google turned up junk from 2 years prior, but not a single word for Friday. I guess nobody reads the papers fast enough to stir things up so Google caches things before the ZDN's word gets priority over Google.
TFA header/byline as timestamped on ZDN is:
"HP to slash approximately 15,000 jobs
By Dawn Kawamoto, and Michael Singer, CNET News.com Published on ZDNet News: July 16, 2005, 8:00 PM PT"
Saturday NIGHT, no less...
I suppose it *is* possible someone at
To get a submission posted before the regulars, is it necessary to add more redundant verbiage and speculation than the FA itself? Or wait for ZDN and on-site papers to display the content?
Karma Purged/forsaken....
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Even Forbes posted by 12:25 PM Friday , beating ZDN/CNET by some 1.25 days.
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2005/07/15/hewlett-
Does any submitter/top posting authority at
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
HP seems hellbent on self destruction.
First the utterly pointless merger with Compaq.
Then the abandonment of developing HP-PA in favor of developing Itanium.
Then dissolving the Itanium partnership.
Now, inflicting DRM on all their consumer products. Woo hoo, because it worked so fucking well for Sony that Apple ground them to dust.
If I were an HP shareholder, I'd be demanding executives heads on platters about now...
Compaq merger against the will of the HP founders.
Carly makes big bucks for failure.
The R&D staff is worthless where no market exists for the innovation.
Dumping sales staff IS the definition of business failure.
Growth is the measure of business success.
There is no growth where R&D & sales are cut to pay for the golden parachutes.
Bush's new SEC nominee will prevent any derivitive actions.
HP is a goner.
according to this article, you can get a PC from HP with decent performance for as low as $250? 1 option includes Athlon 3000+, 256MB RAM, 40GB drive, Win XP home, integrated video and sound, and a keyboard and mouse.
Does their cost cutting measures allow them to sell cheaper pcs? Is support for these machines going to suffer?
Vote for Pedro
" Are these workers entitled to those jobs?"
No more than the CEO.
" They took those jobs knowing fully well what the rules of the game were"
Really? Was there a rule book someplace? Is that the same rule book that said Carly Fiorina is entitled to a $20M reward for destroying HP? these 15,000 workers combined couldn't do the damage she did to HP, and they didn't get a $20M golden parachute.
Where is that rule written?
Ask the shareholders if they knew of a business that keeps cutting core competency and workers and survived. Ask the shareholders if they knew the rules that gave Carly all that money to leave the company she destroyed. That big equity drop they felt? Oops, that was Carly with her golden parachute. I'll bet nobody knew *that* rule.
Cripes, you're such a f*cking dullard.
how long?
...
/. can even afford the median value home here?
What doesn't seem to be apparent to some is that HP employs some 9,000 in the SF Bay Area.
TFA, by Teresa Poletti, Mercury News July 15,2005|Friday:
"On Thursday, Cindy Shaw, an analyst at Moore & Cabot, issued a report citing a Silicon Valley insider who said HP may announce a management reorganization as early as Monday that could include widely expected layoffs. Shaw's report was the first to predict job cuts could be as high as 25,000. HP employs 9,000 in the Bay Area and 150,000 people worldwide.
But analysts believe Hurd needs to cut more for the company to be competitive."
Well, imagine what could happen to the Silicon Valley real estate market if, say, 5,000 or 2,000, or even 500 of those homes, homes which could be county-value-assed at over $450,000 and and FMV/market-appraisable at $650,000 or higher suddenly go on the market in the next 4 months when the style-of-living wipes out much of the severance checks or goes to buying up 100 lottery tickets per week, filling up the Porshes that end up being towed after the BMW and the high-and-dry trailer-lodged boat.
People will be scrambling to sell them before school resumes for many of the students, hoping to appease the buyers who may be parents. Right now, in San Jose, HUNDREDS of townhomes and condos are under construction, building going on as if the bubble is still here. If other large employers based here follow HP's move (by choice or necessity), I wouldn't be surprised to see many more existing homes in the Valley to compete with unfinished residential units.
How many of us on
Worse, this layoff could have silent, delayed but eventually painful trickle-down repercussions:
-Vendors' orders owed to HP not fulfilled
-Vendors' orders owed BY HP not fulfilled
-Vendors have to lay off due to payments delays
-OEMs and others cancel orders due to web of other orders breaking down
-County/state payroll taxes dropping due to laid off workers
-Unemployment counts going up
(Watch for the dry dipsticks in DC fail to count the HP Layoffs, or to report them as a tiny but negligible "blip" on the radar, as if the humans are "discountable"...)
And, we've been told "We're at the bottom of the 'V', and we're going to pull up hard and fast..."
Sure, I've never seen a rollercoaster that slammed into a vertex without shattering its passengers or without jumping the tracks and scaring the hell out of the patrons in the line waiting for that ride...
They *could* have described the bottom as a "mild, shallow, but long 'V' that we have to traverse for some time, but we'll come out of it in OK shape...".
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
"You just sound naive when you boil complex policies down to a few sentences on a web board."
/. is delicious sometimes.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
The unintentional irony on
" I got a good chuckle out of that but CEOs make a lot of money because they're worth a lot of money."
As a rule? Or just specific CEO's?
Do you think Carly Fiorina was worth all that money? Do you think she did such a fabulous job that her severance package is worth more than the severance package of the 15,000 soon-to-be laid off HP workers?
Or is a CEO only worth as much as they can create wealth? In other words, a CEO that loses money, loses market share lays off people is worth what? A lot? A little?
Is a good CEO worth a lot? Probably. Is a bad CEO worth a lot? I think they have a negative worth associated with them. So why is it that CEO's are rarely punished for doing a poor job? I mean just losing your job and being given a $21M severance package hardly seems like punishment to me, but perhaps I live in the wrong social circles?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
You can't shrink your way to profitability. At least not in the long term.
Not sure who said it, but it seems to be correct. Companies that are laying off lots of people are on the path to being bought out by someone else. At best.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Hey - with that huge tax rebate that we got from Bush, I'm totally shocked and surprised by this! I mean, the economy has been stimulated, hasn't it?
Well, perhaps we need to give the wealthy a bigger tax break. That old economy just isn't starting.
Or, perhaps, there's something else that can be done.
More high-level discussions on the layoffs will occur late next week and employees may get a greater sense of their specific status sometime thereafter.
As an investor I see this and think "hmm, not only is this company about to take a huge one time charge, productivity is going to suck for the forseeable future. This company is going to produce nothing this year."
I'm GLAD that HP is axing 15,000 US workers. I only wish they would ax 120,000 just to teach all you idiots a lesson rather than hear you cry like a bunch of losers that you are!
HP management is paying their employees to innovate and if they're not innovating then they should get laid-off or fired! Management is just that, management and nothing else. Engineers are PAID TO INNOVATE and apparently they've been slacking since HP is getting rid of them. I've been on both sides of the fence and I'm siding with management on this one.
This just makes me want to write to our greedy politicians and ask for them to open our borders up and let the H1-B Visa applicants fly through just so our greedy and lazy assed US engineers and technicians will be forced to compete and innovate or get their jobs outsourced!
After enough tech workers are unemployed they'll be forced into new fields like management and become MBAs which will only force the economy to completely reverse. I envision the day where MBAs will be dime-a-dozen forcing them to compete for work like rats. Thanks too all the universities and TV shows like "The Apprentice" that are pushing MBA programs, my dream will be reality very soon.
All of those engineers and technicians that do nothing to improve their skills sets or start innovating will end up picking fruit on farms along with their Mexican NAFTA friends. These are also the very people we DON'T want in our country since they don't contribute anything worthy to our country but overrun our emergency rooms and drive them into bankruptcy.
Truth is, is that all the smart people are leaving the US and the rest of the US will become a giant Mexico in the near future. This is all fact, just look at the birth rates and population fluctuations as well as minority to Caucasian ratios these days and projected future population growths. Don't get me wrong by any means, I'm not a racist but the US is starting to look like crap compared to other countries because of all the dumb people in the US, especially all the dumb Mexicans that leech THIS country dry. Caucasians and Asians statistically are smarter due to their habits and drive to succeed. Statistically, Mexicans only care about eating, drinking and screwing all night. I can't wait to see what happens next.
" 'We suspect that Hurd might be able to lower HP's annual $3.5 billion in R&D by $250 (million)-$500 million through the elimination of non-core projects', Sacconaghi said."
This is a quick fix for the quarterly numbers, not a plan to improve long-term viability of the company.
Wow this is very important timing to the economy. Over 50% of the U.S's real estate profits are derived from about 10 states, CA being the biggest one. There is already plenty of talk about the Housing Bubble.
I work for HP in the IT dept.
Reading this article came as a bit of a surprise but ever since the merger with compaq we should be used to finding out life chaning news about our company from the media first.
What even more interesting is the fact they wish to slash lots of jobs in IT and about 4 days ago we hired a new CIO by the nameof Randy Mott.
Gee, I wonder why he's been hired eh? Maybe
Not funny to the people laid off.
Second quarter profit 1.3 Billion. See http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/investor/financials/quart ers/2005/q2.html "HP had a solid quarter," said Mark Hurd, HP chief executive officer and president. "We grew revenue 7%, non-GAAP earnings per share rose 9% and we generated $2.4 billion in cash flow from operations.
t ers/2005/q1.html
First quarter profit 1.3 Billion. See http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/investor/financials/quar
Tell me please. If it is making over a billion per quarter in profit, why will they fire people who made it happen?
http://encyclopedia.laborlawtalk.com/IQ_and_the_We alth_of_Nations
Good! Homes are overvalued compared to income levels anyways!
you cannot start your own professional baseball league, it is illegal. major league baseball has a monopoly that is protected by law. that is why the "farm teams" do not play in the same markets as the majors - it is illegal to directly compete with MLB. no BS, you can read up on this. no other sport has this protection.
During the other recessions, I never had any doubt that the USA would pull out of it, stronger than ever.
I've also worked in IT 26 years. I've seen a few cycles there also. Again, this time I'm much less optimistic.
JMHO.
..Randall Mott, who is coming over from Dell. Why the big bucks? To make it worth his while to move over to HP. RTFA here: http://yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsAr ticle.jhtml?duid=mtfh31022_2005-07-15_23-17-48_n15 165265_newsml ..where, by the way, it points out:
"Mott was not listed among the five most highly paid executives in Dell's most recent proxy statement. In Dell's fiscal 2005, the lowest salary earned by the five highest-paid executives was $522,000." (Well, his base pay at HP will be only $625,000.)
"What if I need to circulate my resume?"
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
We all started as ejaculate from our fathers...
Is that murder when I pull out or when I come in my girlfriend's mouth?
Its such a stupid argument.
Its a human life when they can make it on their own. Until then, its no different than that ejaculate.
And when they do fail, it's usually not much of an event, unless the failure is one of large porportians.
When one of these large companies goes down, it brings a bit of the GNP down with it. The GNP doesn't really mean too much to the man on the street, as he's not holding any shares or likely to be employed by any of the fortune 100. But it does concern our government. That's because the goernment has become a branch of the corporations in an economic sense. So the government will bail out Fannie May, various Savings and Loans, and a few choice friends, allowing you to pay for it all over again.
I'm not totally against the government bailing out corporations when it provide more good to the people than non-interference. But it seems that the government is burning it's candle at both ends. It's promoting the well being of the corporation to the detriment of human rights, a stable workforce, and even jobs within our borders, and then acts the part of noble rescuer when these beasts fail, allowing us to pick up the check. It wouldn't be so bad if corporations didn't flaunt thier misdeads so blatantly.
Note that HP had a great calculator division which brought in over 6 millon a year and employed 30 people before it was cut in a move like this one. The decision was made on the grounds that nobody would notice lack of R & D for a few years. Now that it's many years later, people have noticed, and HP Calculators are a thing of historic glory.
Fire one million. One of the smaller companies, so nobody notices.
"Freiheit ist immer auch die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden" - Rosa Luxemburg, 1871 - 1919
Welcome to management. All that matters is the stock price.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
... that it never says something like
"...planning to layoff 15000 employees. Management, Human Resources and Marketing will be among the areas particularly hit..."
Or is it just me?
If it is making over a billion per quarter in profit, why will they fire people who made it happen?
Since there is no such thing as "too much profit", cutting your labor expenses will obviously increase next quarter's profit. And then next quarter a new round of layoffs will increase next quarter's profit and so on until no one works for the company and you have maximum profit.
Of course, since they laid off all of the people who made it happen, they're going to fall behind in R&D, etc. their stock price will plummet and someone will end up buying them out for their name.
Repeat after me, "stock price is all that matters".
Your argument is very well thought out and one of the best I've read on slashdot...
I was also a full subscriber to the invisible hand theory of freemarket economics once upon a time. The elegance of Adam Smiths arguments is very compelling, and if you look back in history it seems the natural evolution of an enlightened society.
However, somewhere between highschool and adulthood, 2 major flaws became apparent.
The first problem is inflation. Just as a currency devalues if the supply increases, so does the value of human labor. Adam Smith was writing in the late 18th century. England, along with mos t of the rest of Europe was still recovering from the ravages of the Black Plauge, assorted wars, and general bad health care/nutrition. Communication was slow and travel difficult. In other words the pool of labor was very small. With a small labor pool each persons economic value is much greater, meaning they can earn vastly more.
Fast forward to the early 20th Century in the US where "modern" free market economics gets its start. Again we have a relativly isolated landmass. We also have huge natural resources and land. Communication is better but still nothing like today. Travel while easier is still not trivial - no superhighways or 747s. Slavery has ended. We again have a relativly small labor pool and a great deal of resources. Thus the value of the human laboror is again high. Since Labor is one of the scarcest resources it can buy much more, and the "free market" works... for a while.
Then we get the robber barons, the monopolists, the "fat cats" etc. The Free market is showing its flaws. Unions start, and begin to restore the value of labor again by creating a artificial scarcity. WWI occurs but as black tuesday and the depression showed it was not quite enough and the flaws of "pure capitalism" begin to become obvious.
Then we get WWII. This has an interesting effect. Just when the middle/lower classes in the US need it most, we again get a significant reduction in the labor pool. The flip side however is that the other 50% of the population begins to enter the labor pool. Free market is shored up again, labor is expensive and we get the "golden age" of the 1950's and early 60's.
Korea and Vietnam happen and reduce the labor pool again, but the rising population numbers are only slowed not stopped - We get the "silver age" of the 80's. Good if you were _already_ middle/upper middle+ but the cracks are really beginning to show for the rest of the workforce. The world is getting smaller, communication is getting better, and the value of the person is diminishing with both global AND local population increases.
During the 40's 50's 60's smart economists are realizing that "pure" free market is not such a good idea. It ends up with mono-cultures and robber barons, and "noble" families - all of which defeat the benefits of capitalism - diversity, competition, and opportunity.
This begins the efforts of regulation. In a capitalist society power follows money. This means that those with the most money - the "nobles", the monopolies, the large corporations, have the power - Power that directly grows in proportion to the population as the individuals power shrinks. A few idealistic men and women tried to put a check on this power with regulation to protect the workers, the buyers, the children, and the environment. This helped for a bit (again see the 80's) but eventually money and ruthlessness has again overpowered idealism. The established interest already had the resources to circumvent regulation - and after a recovery they produced the new de-regulation politicos of today.
To sum things up. Capitalism is a bad idea. Like democracy it the only thing it has going for it is that its better than most of the other methods we have found - the exception perhaps being socialism. I understand your fears, but England, Sweden, Iceland, and others of the northern western states with socialist leanings do seem to be doing pretty well.
If they don't know you, they don't accept your submissions.
Its a crappy caviate, but what can you do.
I was under the impression that Compaq wanted to emulate IBM in provide a full business solution including services. Rather than grow their own, they acquired DEC which had been make good inroads in that direction. The dot.com boom which favored younger companies over older ones created the "currency" for these upside-down type mergers.
DECs respected hardware division which created the PDP, VAX and Alpha didnt really mesh with Compaq's or HP's hardware directions, so were allowed to languish. For some time the Alpha was considered the best CPU chip in the business, far more interesting than anything out of Intel.
Eurozone unemployment is at 8.8% and Ireland has the lowest at 4.2%, as of May 2005. Its disgraceful tripe like the parent post that make slashdot what it is today.
And while America is doing slightly worse at 5.0%, some fun facts about those stats...
Although the number of jobs in June exceeded its level at the start of the recession, this is really an indication of how sluggish the jobs recovery has been. In June 2005, the U.S. economy had 1,026,000 (or 0.8 percent) more jobs than it had in March 2001, when the recession began. In every previous recession since World War II the number of jobs at this point in the economic recovery was at least 4.9 percent higher than it was at the beginning of the recession.
May was the 32 nd straight month in which more than one out of every five unemployed workers had been looking for work for more than six months, the longest such period on record. June saw some improvement, with the share of long-term unemployed dropping by 2.3 percentage-points to 17.8 percent. However, such a high long-term unemployment level is unusual when the unemployment rate is low; historically, 5 percent unemployment rates have been accompanied by average long-term jobless rates of 10.7 percent.
Average hourly wages were 2.7 percent higher in June 2005 than in June 2004. But, since the inflation rate was 2.8 percent between May 2004 and May 2005, inflation-adjusted wages actually fell during the past year.
Check your facts before you flame, troll.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
Here's some scoop from a Bulgarian. Programming here pays about $750 per month. I imagine that in other IT-related jobs the salary is about $400 per month (at most). People at my age (almost 25) that work in the IT business are usually well educated, with a university degree, and quite competitive. Many choose to leave the country and work abroad, as thus they can get better salaries, in fact too may leave the country as we have a severe negative demographic growth crisis at the moment.
Now, something scary. Most of us Bulgarians hope our salaries will reach the salary levels of west Europe, but it is much more likely that the opposite will come true: qualified westerners will have to reduce their needs until they fit into our mold.
Ouch.
So, outsourcing hurts us too, although it doesn't seem like that from the short-sighted point of view shared by most IT people I know (including myself for that matter) who are more than content to take salaries two or three times higher than the country standard, and buy dirt cheap goods. Well, practice shows that countries accepted in the EU usually raise their prices to match the EU prices, but salaries rise little.
working link:
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm
Did the horse and buggy makers "complain" when the automobile come along - or did they get into the business of auto repair?
Fact is fact, ahole.
HERE:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/166401907